The NSA Spying Is Bigger Than Verizon – Phone Sex, Banks & Google

The National Security Agency is using our electronic conveniences to data-mine information about every American. In the so-called country where freedom rings appears to be spying on it’s own people to levels we can says surpasses anything Orwell or the East German Stasi could come up with.

These findings remind us of what right-wing conspiracy theorists warned us of. We laughed them off as being outlandish . I mean, this is America right?

The National Security Agency’s warrant for metadata on every single Verizon call for three months is jaw-dropping in its scope. Except, well, the NSA’s surveillance of our communications is most likely much, much bigger than that. Technology has made it possible for the American government to spy on citizens to an extent East Germany could only dream of. Basically everything we say that can be traced digitally is being collected by the NSA. We’re supposed to trust that our government will be much better behaved, but they’re not, and the White House almost admits it. That doesn’t mean they’re admitting everything.

“On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records,” The Week’s Marc Ambinder writes of Glenn Greenwald’s scoop last night. “My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes.” Previous reporting from many outlets suggests that’s true. In 2006, USA Today‘s Leslie Cauley reported the NSA was secretly collecting call records with data from AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. A source told Cauley, “It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world” and that the NSA wanted “to create a database of every call ever made” within U.S. territory. Likewise, in 2011, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer spoke to former NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney, who “believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later.” He thinks the NSA wants all emails to be searchable, the same way we search with Google. “The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress,” Mayer said. As Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Atlantic Wire last night, “This is confirmation of what we’ve long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country.” Update: In defending the program, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems to indicate that the court order is a regular, quarterly thing. “There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is, that this was a routine three-month approval under seal that was leaked,” Feinstein said on Thursday.

Share on your Network

Related

About the Author

Politisite delivers the latest Breaking Political News, Debate Coverage, Election Results, Commentary and Analysis. We provide in-depth news with special reports and interactive political coverage.
Politisite was a pioneer in internet political news gathering and dissemination. Politisite came live in early 1998 and become the first internet only news source to cover local, state, and national political campaigns, debates and elections. Before there were the terms Blog, Blogger, New Media, or Crowd-sourcing, Politisite was developing what has become the standard in political news coverage, long before most political sites were even conceived. The Name ‘Politisite” simply means Political Website.